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Comment by tosti | Hacker News Reader

Intuitive? I never thought anyone would ever describe something as arcane as a tracker intuitive. I can't think of something worse. Pure Data comes close.

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I would also consider trackers as being very intuitive in a lot of ways compared to DAWs, coming from the perspective of someone who isn't great at playing midi controllers live.

I do find tracker software to not be as immediate compared to a DAW for quickly producing a loop or initial idea, but beyond that initial hump the workflows for fully fleshing out and completing a track seem simpler and intuitive compared to a DAW, IMO. Once you have established the beginning of an idea the UX feels like editing a spreadsheet. The difference between using a DAW or tracker, for me feels like the difference between coding in a text editor versus using a node based UI. They are both intuitive in very different ways.

Loading a module and playing it in a tracker is how I learned to make music. You see what notes and samples are triggered when and whatever effect commands are used to make it sound the way it does.

Besides, once you've memorized screens and hotkeys (which happens pretty fast, because there aren't that many) you don't need it to be intuitive.

A couple of years ago I downloaded SchismTracker. The muscle memory from Scream/Impulse Tracker from 20-25 years prior, coming back in an instant was one of the most wonderful computer interactions of my life. <3

So you basically brute-force your way through?

Like, you load or generate a sine wave as a sample and just keep changing the numbers until you've got a rough idea of what does what?

I guess nowadays it's easier to read the source code of mikmod or milkytracker. But back in the day, heck no. MIDI sorta worked, but not great. My recordings were an awful mess because the timings were always slightly off such that it was impossible to have a bar with normal 1/4 notes.

Being an impatient teenager, I did brute-force the note-key layout, but I didn't have to - each context/screen had it's own help page. You could view all screens (and their respective shortcut) by pressing ESC.

I'd rather label it "experimenting" than "brute-forcing", testing what would happen if I were to put this or that value to this or that effect. Perhaps others would do it differently but I'd go by ear almost all of the time and adjust bit by bit.

Since you could save samples from downloaded modules, you could quickly build a starter library - although "ripping" samples was considered "lame". In lack of (expensive) synthesizers, some musicians would buy Sample CDs.

In my experience (90s Sweden), of those fortunate enough to have a home computer (usually a 486 66 MHz w 8 MB), few also had MIDI. I knew of one person who ran Cubase on Windows 3.11 with hardware samplers etc, which I found immensely exotic!

If you have no serious problem to wrap your head around the columnar presentation of data than "intuitive" is not an unapt way to describe the whole deal. Say, where music theory and practice intersect with something like a spreadsheet, for example... two things one might've already been exposed to before.

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